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I’ve had some dazzling highs in recovery of late, but the last day or two have felt, well, a little flat. It can’t be unicorns and fluffy kittens all the time and sometimes, life is just ok.

It’s good for me to keep this blog because I’ve always charted my highs and lows and it teaches me one message over and over in many different ways: recovering isn’t linear. Some months I’ve felt like I’m walking backwards through mud, others I’ve been quite literally walking on air. And being the temperamental alcoholic I am, this can change in a matter of hours. Knowing I’m susceptible to this change is one of the greatest weapons in my sober armoury: it helps me gain much needed perspective and ride the emotional roller coaster without panicking.

My spiritual growth recently has been blossoming, but this has come at a bit of a price; I’ve felt a little introverted, like I need to be out in the world more. And that’s the next phase- moving from taking time for me to giving time to others, to socialise again and make the most of my freedom.

What I love about maturing in recovery is that ice been through enough ups and downs now to know this: nothing lasts forever. A feeling won’t kill us. But a drink might.

And that’s what I’m saying thank you for today- the compulsion to drink is no longer with me and that is a gift I can enjoy daily.

I posted last week about the feeling of sheer abundance I’m enjoying of sober life, struggling to find the words for the shift that has happened. I feel abundance of love, joy, hope, self esteem and the ability to cope what life is throwing at me.

I came across this article today, and wanted to share it here, as it comes the closet I have yet seen to describing how I feel.

I’ve posted the full article below, but I just wanted to pick out this section as it hits the nail on the head for me:

The loud, disruptive, vicious voice began to quiet and something new began to come through. A calm, knowing, confident voice that was ancient and familiar, and had all of the answers began to permeate my meditations and my days. Not only did it have the answers, but the energy was the love and connection I had been searching for outside of myself my entire life. This voice became my primary relationship and I quickly witnessed my external world transform before my eyes.

I must confess, meditation isn’t a big part of my life in the formal sense, but I feel like I’m conducting living meditation daily, taking time for gratitude and pleasure in my every day actions, letting stress wash over me and exercising in a way that reaffirms my joy in living rather than punishing myself with it.

Sobriety feels like a crystal that reflects a different quality of light depending on the hour and the angle from which I gaze at it. There is dark as well as light, but my existence feels the most positive it ever has.

At age 13, I had my first breakup, and my fears and codependent patterns had already hatched. My parents’ version of therapy was putting me into a Shambhala Training program, where I was supposed to meditate for three days. I would go on for another decade of breakups and a strong aversion to meditation.

At age 31, I finally hit the rock bottom that woke me up, making me ready to listen and align with my spiritual path. Between tears and sleep, I sat. In those moments, between the thoughts, fear, heartbreak and emotions, I would get glimpses of something I’d never seen or felt before. A flash of peace – or at least neutrality. A warm blanket enveloping me and an energy that could only be explained as pure love. White lights flashed behind my eyelids, and the center between my eyes felt magnetic. Sometimes I would sit for hours. Sometimes just minutes. Rushes of shivers and goosebumps rose up and through my body. Heat in my hands. I had no idea what was going on. Everything scared me, but I was desperate, so I kept sitting. Every day.

After living my entire life with the belief that I was alone in the world, I became willing to reach for something higher, something beyond the physical realm, and accept that it lived within me and all around me. I became willing to witness my thoughts and to stop putting faith in all of the fearful perceptions I had created. I was ready to choose love instead. I developed an intellectual understanding that only love was real and that fear was an illusion, but since I still believed in the nightmares, I chose love, figuring I would have nothing to lose. The experience of this shift in perception was the miracle. I knew I could lose no more than I already had, but I had no idea how much I was about to gain.

When I sat, I could surrender all the fears, my stories, my situation, my relationships, my past, to the healing force that I was opening my mind and heart for the first time in my life, to transmute it all back to love.

The loud, disruptive, vicious voice began to quiet and something new began to come through. A calm, knowing, confident voice that was ancient and familiar, and had all of the answers began to permeate my meditations and my days. Not only did it have the answers, but the energy was the love and connection I had been searching for outside of myself my entire life. This voice became my primary relationship and I quickly witnessed my external world transform before my eyes.

As my happiness blossomed from within and poured out of me into everything I did and everyone I came into contact with, I was healing and everyone around me was healing. I would wake up in the middle of the night with sweat drenching only my heart center. I began to wake early, before sunrise, with an energy and exuberance I never thought possible. My level of compassion and empathy heightened exponentially, and they poured out to the world and its people and animals and all living things. My relationships healed; my work expanded in extraordinary ways, with my clients growing faster than I thought possible; and my body was healed of all physical ailments.

Meditation cracked me open to my own self-healing capacity and my path of self-knowledge. Remembering who we really are is our purpose and the journey we came here for. Within the non-physical realm where I could connect, I began learning about who I really was – I saw that everyone in my life was love, and the entire planet was love. The idea of separation dissolved and I felt oneness, where all duality released. I came home.

As I began shedding a skin so old it felt like I’d held onto it for eons, the voice within me grew in strength and passion with an urgency behind it. During meditation I received guidance to write pages from a voice I didn’t recognize, one of loving authority, truth and wisdom. I knew it wasn’t me writing – this was bigger than me, and it was guiding me to all of my next right actions.

Meditation is no longer a passive practice where we isolate ourselves from society and go to a hilltop to sit for days, weeks or years; meditation is the most powerful vehicle for taking action in the world. Action backed with love carries more strength than millions acting from a place of fear.

The time is now. We must all take responsibility to discover our truth and bring the beauty of it out into the world. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

If you said to me when I was coming to terms with the fact I’m an alcoholic: ‘Hey, you might be an alcoholic, but give it a year and you’ll feel AMAZING’ I’d have told you to stick it where the sun don’t shine. I honestly thought my life wasn’t that bad when I was drinking. In fact, it wasn’t bad at all. I knew that drinking was eroding me internally and that I had so much pain that was a result of it, but I didn’t think the rest of my life was in crisis.

As I’ve grown in recovery, I’ve had an experience that fits the old AA cliché- I truly am living ‘a life beyond my wildest dreams.’ And it’s not the life I expected. Of course I still feel acute pain, emotional turmoil and have down periods; I’m human. But as my sobriety grows and matures, my life is being infused with a profound sense of serenity that’s permeating every area of my existence.

In early sobriety, I used to talk about carrying a little sober flame inside me. Over the past 14 months, I’ve kindled that flame, protected it and treasured it above all else. And now the joyous heat of that flame is starting to permeate through every fibre of my being. I feel like I’ve turned into a MASSIVE hippy, but the best way of describing it is that I feel like I’m living a truly spiritual life. Not spiritual in the sense that my behaviour is particularly remarkable or commendable, but that I’m being guided by a spiritual connection to something. I feel like that if I trust in this spiritual path, the rest of my life will unfold exactly as it should do. My fear about the unknown is lessened. The mystery of the divine plan intrigues me. (I should add a caveat about what I mean by ‘divine’ here, and I can’t quite articulate it, but my spirituality isn’t a religious one. I’m not looking at the big guy in the sky here).

I wish I could be more specific about how this shift is manifesting itself in my life without breaking my anonymity. But I can say this. I started the year off inching towards my sober anniversary looking forward to that momentous moment. When I hit it, I felt great, reflecting on what was achieved, but the weeks that followed were tough and low. I lost my groove and felt that being sober was such a TRIAL. I met up with some sober friends and had a bit of a moan about it all, if I’m honest.

That low period was followed by an intense period in my professional life, where I was assaulted by politics, uncertainty and financial worries. All I could do was tune into the spiritual principles I’d learnt in AA and trust that everything would be ok. I think that this was the first period in my life where I truly practiced acceptance. I didn’t begrudgingly accept, I fully accepted, on a deep level, what was happening to me. I let the uncertain experiences wash over me as I clung onto my spirituality, and it worked.

Now, I’m emerging from that period I feel like everything has clicked. My mental health, which is up and down at the best of times, feels like it’s underpinned by a new layer of strength. I have so much gratitude for everything in my life I feel profoundly free in a way I never ever had. The serenity I feel is so deep I feel like it’s penetrated my body on a cellular level. How crazy is THAT? I feel like this every day at the moment and the stress of the daily commute and work woes are just temporary ripples in the calm lake.

My self esteem has taken leaps and bounds. I blogged the other day about how, all of a sudden, my relationship with food seems to have turned a corner. It’s remarkable. I feel like the emotional connection I was bound to before has been dramatically severed.

I know this all sound gushing and quite possibly ridiculous, but it’s all true and I want to commit it to paper, to help me through the tougher times.

What mystifies me is how quickly things feel like they have changed. I wonder, in sobriety, whether the daily work we put in collects somewhere internally, having a cumulative effect that isn’t tangible immediately, but sometimes breaks through so we feel its abundance. That’s what I feel like. Like there’s a bathtub of little positive sober drops that I’ve deposited there over the past year, that’s now overflowing.

I’m going to go the whole hog here on the cheesy-over the top stuff. Bear with me. I feel like in the last 3 weeks, a shift has happened that will transform the rest of my life. Like for the first time in my adult existence, it has all clicked into place. Like I understand myself and the world around me on a more profound level than ever, and that life starts HERE.

I still haven’t worked out what shape my ‘higher power’ takes, and maybe I never will. But this I do know: I feel Her presence (because of course She is female) in my daily life and for that I am incredibly grateful.

If you are thinking about stopping drinking, I implore you to read some of my posts from 2013 and Jan 2014 and compare them to the person who stands before you today. On the outside I had it together. No-one but me sensed I needed to stop drinking. It was the hardest thing I have ever done and yet it has changed every aspect of my life beyond comprehension. It’s possible, it’s all possible and for me, finding a spiritual way through recovery was the only thing that did it for me. So if you’re relying on willpower alone, consider a spiritual approach. It might just change your life.

This paragraph of an old post really spoke to me today and how much things have changed:

I don’t actually know how I feel about my life because of drinking-am I doing the right job for me? Have I got my sights set on the man who would actually make me happy? Do I want to work in an office for the rest of my life? Do I need to consider changing career if I’m ever going to be happy? I have no idea. Not a clue. I have made some big life changes, as I’ve posted about before, in the last year which have improved lots of things, but there’s more work to be done. I’ll just have to see what the sober journey brings. Maybe I’m not designed to live in a big city, maybe I should one day think about a career change. These are the things which I’ll only know after a year or two sober, when I can learn to know that the voice that’s speaking is me the person, not me the alcoholic.

I’m in touch with that voice today, that authentic voice of who I am and what will make me happy in life and that is so precious.

Now I’ve written this blog shouting from the rooftops how happy I am, I’m sure I’ll be back here in a matter of days bemoaning some terrible emotional low 😉 But it really does feel like my sober toolbox is better equipped than ever before. And for that I’m so grateful.

My whole life I have had a fascination with pain. I remember being very young and trying to articulate what a recurring stomach pain felt like to my mum, and not having the words. This fascination with the lack of sufficient language to describe pain was a theme in my academic writing; I once published a paper on a particular poet’s struggle to articulate pain, and spent months musing over what makes pain so difficult to describe. Language can barely convey the agony of true pain.

But it’s only recently that I’ve truly begun to understand pain. Because for me, physical pain, hurting oneself is a purely biological reaction to something and that kind of pain, although horrible, I can tolerate (as long as it’s not medically disastrous pain, like breaking your leg).

Recently, my pain has been an entirely emotional one, a feeling I have wrestled with and been unable to pinpoint and has almost torn me apart at times. Last weekend, when someone commented on my weight, it was like the old wounds of body image and disordered eating were torn open afresh. That pain poured out in hot, fresh tears that felt like they would never stop flowing. I couldn’t eat for an entire day. I was reminded of a Sylvia Plath short story I read when I was a teenager, in which ‘chocolate pudding stopped think and bitter’ in a scolded child’s throat.Because my go-to numbing substance of late has been sugar, all I wanted to do was eat. Which is ironic, of course, given that it was my weight being criticised. Yet my throat was constricted by tears and emotion, preventing me from numbing. I had to let the tears flow, the pain be acknowledged, talked through and eventually, put to bed.

Ever since last weekend, it’s like the most enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I have taken 100 steps forward in my journey. Because this weight criticism incident, and some others that I won’t go into detail here that happened that weekend, I have been forced to confront some of my issues head on. And the spiritual progress I have made this week feels like more than I have in months. I have looked my problems in the face and started to be honest with myself about what I need to change. But also, for the first time in a long time, I accepted that I’d have to walk through the pain to get to where I want to be.

And through facing pain and discomfort head on, I feel like I’ve had another awakening, almost as seismic as the one I had when I walked into my first AA meeting. I have experienced the most profound serenity this week and connection with my higher power. It’s been quite incredible. I’ve turned into a bit of an overnight hippy with it all, and I love it. I can feel the growth happening. How and what is going on I’m not sure, but to me it feels like joy of the unknown, faith in a bigger plan and embracing the difficult in order to find something better.

The eating-related part of my progress may be a phase, as my relationship with food is always fraught, but I’ve been really focusing on nourishing and not restriction, and I’ve had the most wonderful week with it. I kept a photo food diary and it’s bursting with greens and gorgeous nourishing foods that stop me wanting to binge. I only had one rule: eat chocolate every day. And I did, and only a little, and I feel brilliant for it.

My soul is opening up and telling me something this week, ushering me into a new phase, the nature of which is yet unknown. Intuitively, it feels like although the trigger was related to weight, this isn’t about food, or weight, or alcoholism, or any of my other problem, but about working through the difficult and uncomfortable hands it feels like life sometimes deals me, deals all of us. I’ve stopped feeling guilty about ‘having problems’ when others have much worse- if they’re real to me, they’re real problems and in order to be the best I can, I have to address them.

I read this excerpt from a blog this week and wanted to share it here, as it sums up my experiences at the moment:

In TRUTH, nothing is WRONG. Everything is going EXACTLY AS PLANNED. It just hurts like hell. The Ivory Tower has to fall in order for you to be reborn. You cannot be transformed unless you walk through the fire. And you can’t read about it in a book. Or be told about it by some teacher. You must BECOME. You must burn in the fire to be born anew. This is the path of waking up.

So last week I posted how I had fallen off the sugar wagon dramatically. Ever since, I have been thinking about what’s going on inside and why food has, of late, become such an issue for me. Combining this with a very painful conversation over the weekend with someone who told me I could lose a few pounds to be at my best (I know, I know, unhelpful. But it’s probably true. That’s what so annoying about it.) I’ve been reflecting on how I can change.

Because what I’m dealing with now is emotional eating and that needs to be tackled head on as part of my recovery. Weight is one factor of course, but emotional health is another one. Doing what I’m doing is making me feel rubbish.

What I can’t wrap my head around is how someone who was once so controlled around food has lost it entirely. I’ve observed recently that many of my friends who have also come out the other side of an ED have put on a few too many pounds, and I wondered whether I might not be alone in this. Because at a very first look, it doesn’t make sense, does it? Woman with eating disorder who has been absolutely terrified by the idea of being fat gets, well, a little fat. Logically it sounds absurd, but for many psychological and emotional reasons it makes absolute sense.

I started looking around for evidence of whether my experience is common online and came across the below article by Charlotte from The Great Fitness Experiment who I’ve followed on and off for years. And she reaffirmed what I suspected; being in the position I’m in and wanting to shift a little of that extra ‘recovery’ weight is completely normal. What struck even more of a chord is her observation that many many women who recover from an ED tend towards bulimic episodes or turning to alcohol to help them transition out of their ED. Well that was entirely my experience as readers of this blog well know. It has made me feel SO MUCH BETTER about my behaviours and also given me the beginnings of the tools to change.

As ever, it’s not about the substance it’s about the emotions. And this is what I needed to realise once more.

I’ve posted the full article below because it’s incredibly helpful to me (especially the image, which made me LOL!) and I hope might help some of the others who are in recovery from an eating disorder AND alcoholism who want to change something in their current behaviours….

Warning: May be triggering for those with sensitivity regarding eating issues, food or eating disorders. Actual numbers are not used nor are diet tips but you know what you need right now – please take gentle care of yourself today.

Here’s a dirty little secret about anorexia: You can’t do it forever. They won’t tell you that on the pro-Ana boards and there are even some celebs that make “functional anorexia” look like a viable life choice. But it isn’t. It doesn’t work. Some people, heartbreakingly, die of the disease. But what of the rest of us? The human body has a powerful life force and eventually it will rebel against starvation. For us champion dieters, food restricters, obsessive compulsives, perfectionists, we eventually have two choices:

1. Do our best to make our peace with our bodies and free ourselves from the tyranny of dieting and weight worries by learning healthy habits to replace the demons one by one.

Obviously choice #1 is optimal and what we aim for in recovery but I’ll be honest: I know very few anorexics who haven’t boomeranged into bulimia (whether purging by chemical, physical or exercise methods) and/or substance abuse (alcohol, diet pills, amphetamines, cocaine) as a means to try to regain control over their weight and bodies.

From the outside an eating disorder may look like the ultimate expression of self-control and willpower but I can tell you from personal experience and from years of hearing other people’s stories that it is about one thing and one thing only: pure, unadulterated fear. And I wouldn’t even say it’s a fear of getting fat. It’s that, yes, but really it’s a fear of being unloveable, of being imperfect, of having powerful needs and desires, of not measuring up, of failing. So many, many fears. An eating disorder is a terrifying roller coaster of highs filled with delusions and lows marked by denial. For awhile we have the illusion of control – food is so passive! So easy to push around! So obedient! – but eventually we realize that our entire lives are being controlled by something that’s not even sentient much less very nice.

So we give in and eat. And for a body so used to restriction this temporary lifting of the bans leads to a bottomless desire that we’re sure can’t be filled and will consume us instead. We eat and eat and eat. There is no balance – when everything is forbidden then that means it’s all equal, apple or apple pie. The body is trying to stay alive even while the mind is trying to kill it. But if we keep eating eventually we gain weight. Often this is a good and necessary thing for healing and recovery. But here’s another secret about eating disorders: They don’t always make you skinny. Moreover, you don’t have to be skinny to have one. Lots of anorexics don’t look “anorexic.”

In an ideal world, we’d all be able to immediately get right back in touch with our hunger cues and eat exactly enough to gain just the right amount of weight and live happily ever after. It didn’t work that way for me. I daresay it doesn’t work that way for a lot of people. Instead, after years of dieting and restricting and other unhealthy habits, suddenly we’re supposed to be the picture of health to be “recovered” and yet we have no clue how to do it. How would we know? I personally have been dieting in earnest since I was 10. Which means that some of us gain more weight than we are comfortable with.

I’ll wait while you laugh.

Actually we all gain more weight than we’re comfortable with. That’s ED treatment in a nutshell. But some people gain more weight than is deemed “necessary” or “healthy” which is such a fine line to walk. How do you talk about what is appropriate or healthy with someone who has no concept of either? And what happens when – if – you end up in a position where you legitimately need to lose a bit of weight? Dieting is just another trip down the rabbit hole. And you’ve worked so SO hard to recover! Plus, by this point, you may even think that dieting is anti-feminist or unsocial or simply unkind. Are you even allowed to think you need to lose weight?

I don’t know the right answer to that question but I do know a lot of us think it, as evidenced by a letter I got from Reader K recently:

I do realise you must get about a zillion of these questions per day, but I would really appreciate it if you found time to answer this.

I am an almost 20-year old girl (gosh, I should probably start saying “woman” by now…) with some history of disordered eating and exercising. I was never diagnosed and wouldn’t say I was ever bulimic/anorexic, etc. but I certainly dropped too low in my weight and exercised too much for quite some time (from sometime around 12 years old to about 18, is my best guess).

I am XXXcm high and the lowest I ever was was about XXkg, which put me in the high end of underweight. What followed were major arguments with my parents about my not eating enough, my feeling exhausted and cranky 90% of the time and secondary amenorrhea. I did pull myself together though (most probably because I absolutely LOVE to eat – ah, the irony – but I guess that was the reason for my being a chubby kid and being made fun of in school, leading to the dramatic weight loss).

I was diagnosed with mild osteopenia [charlotte’s note: that’s bone loss, the precursor to osteoporosis], but otherwise my health is in good condition now. I am fully weight restored and apart from occasional low body image bouts, I am OK. (An aside, the funny thing is that I started liking my body more after I gained weight, how weird is that?)

But here’s my problem:

I am eating normally, trying to follow my hunger cues and eating what I like. I try not to count calories because that leads to restrictive behaviour for me. The thing is that I have only time for exercise 3 to 4 times per week, sometimes less, as I am extremely busy. After I got to my senses I started gaining weight… to XXkg. I am not comfortable at this weight – bot aesthetically and how it makes me feel.

And finally, here’s what I really want to ask – do you have any suggestions/advice as to what I should do, given I cannot increase my activity level, to lose weight the healthy way? It’s driving me nuts because I already eat extremely healthy, following my hunger, but seem to keep gaining!

Advise would be strongly appreciated

If I were any good at the metric system I’d swear I’d written this letter to myself, that’s how much I relate to what K is saying. As I’ve mentioned here before, after starting outpatient treatment for my eating disorder several years ago, I gained a certain amount of weight back and eventually it stabilized at a point which I maintained for two years. While I didn’t ever lose the latent wish to be ten pounds lighter, I did grow to accept and even love my body at that weight. I got comfortable with it and ditched my crazy clothes and bought ones that fit. Most importantly I did it while practicing Intuitive Eating (Geneen Roth style) and so I ate almost everything. My recovery wasn’t perfect but I felt good about it.

And then about a year ago for reasons I still can’t explain I gained a not insignificant amount of weight. I weigh more now than the day I gave birth to Jelly Bean. It changed my clothing size and suddenly I was right back to loathing my body. I felt like a total failure and not just because I had to go buy all new pants. Rather I felt like I was a failure at my ED recovery, at Intuitive Eating, at showing body acceptance – all of it. And so I know quite well how Reader K is feeling. So what’s a girl who’s still recovering from an eating disorder (because recovery is going to be a lifelong process for me, I think) to do when she thinks she might need to lose weight?

I have a few suggestions for K – and for me – but I hope you guys will help out too! This is such tricky territory for me.

1. Get professional help. I spent a long time in therapy. Not only did I complete my eating disorder therapy but I also did a lot of personal therapy. You mention that you never got help for recovering from your ED and it might be helpful, even now. One of the things ED therapy taught me was about proper nutrition. It sounds silly to someone who can spout the caloric content of any food from memory but I learned a lot about what a proper portion looks like, how to balance meals and – most importantly – what “normal” eating looks like. It helps.

2. At least see a nutritionist or dietician. And be honest about your history with disordered eating! He or she can not only help you devise a healthy plan but also serve as a person to be accountable to – not for the weight loss but for the healthy habits part.

3. Get an objective opinion, preferably from a doctor you trust, on whether or not losing weight is really in your best interest. Body dysmorphia is part and parcel with an eating disorder and we’re often not the best judge of what we look like.

4. Focus on what you can eat, not what you “can’t”. I recently cut out sugar for a while in an effort to help my mental state and it was a lot easier when I focused on how my body was feeling and all the yummy foods I enjoyed, rather than torturing myself thinking about all the forbidden treats. Whether or not you lose weight, mindful eating and staying positive will help in a lot of ways.

5. Eat some more protein. I hesitate to make any specific recommendations but I’ve found through personal experience that when I get overly hungry and munchy or crave junk food it’s often because I haven’t had enough “real” food earlier, usually protein and healthy fats. Note: I’m not saying that’s ALL you should eat. But rather that adding in a bit more high-quality grass-fed meat or eggs or coconut oil can help head off a cookie bender. (Also, from looking through your daily meals that you sent me, you do not seem to get much protein…)

6. Do things for yourself that you enjoy and make you feel happy and confident, no matter what you weigh. Being super busy is hard on the body in so many ways, weight being only one of them. I love hiking, skiing and skating – those things always make me feel better about myself. And I love realizing how my strong legs carried me up a mountain rather than focusing on how much they rub together. Reading, painting, piano playing, photography – anything that gets you out of yourself and using your body in a creative way!

7. Accept that life circumstances change and your weight does too. You’re at a really busy time in your life! But things won’t always be this way. Sometimes we weigh more, other times we weigh less. It doesn’t mean that we’ll keep on gaining weight forever and ever.

8. Meditate. It sounds silly I know but a few minutes a day of quiet contemplation/prayer/meditation can do wonders for bringing us back in touch with what we need to nourish ourselves on many levels.

9. Get enough sleep. Stress wreaks havoc with not only weight but also mental state and one of the single best things we can do for our health is to have a good bedtime routine of going to sleep before midnight and getting a solid 7-8 hours, every night.

This is such a touchy topic and I hesitated to broach this on here but eventually I decided I needed to because I know that Reader K and I are not the only two recovering ED’d people to be in this situation! I’d love it if you guys have any other suggestions, advice or even corrections!